Summary

The number of web service providers in the field of bioinformatics is increasing every year.
In theory, these services are interoperable and independent of specific computer languages.
However, each service uses their own definition of the data types and naming conventions for the methods.
Moreover, these services are often not usable by specific languages
(partly, due to the lack of compliance of the SOAP/WSDL specification in the language's library).

This situation prevents these services from becoming popular among and used by end users and developers alike as an infrastructure of their daily research.
The BioMOBY project has tried to overcome these problems by defining ontologies for data types and methods used in the services.
However, there are many major service providers which are not yet participating in the BioMOBY framework.
For example, there are several web service providers in Japan such as DDBJ, KEGG,
PDBj and CBRC but none of them are integrated in any way.

Thus, at DBCLS, we started to develop a new proxy server which translates user's request for the appropriate web service providers.
If all Open Bio* libraries support BioMOBY and other service providers, interoperability among these services can be significantly improved.
Here, we need agreement about the future direction of web services by every web service provider and by client developers.

We believe gathering all web service providers to discuss the standardization of objects and methods among web services,
and Open Bio* library developers from different programming languages (BioPerl, BioPython,
BioRuby, and BioJava) to discuss the implementation of the common infrastructure,
must benefit usability and interoperability for the life science in the next era.

For this purpose, we hope to organize a BioHackathon focusing on web services from four different domains.

Web service providers

Encourage independent service providers to join the movement of integration and interoperability